[WikiEN-l] Bans and online/offline reputation (was Re: Follow-up on my Ban from Wikipedia (part 3))

[Armed Blowfish]

On 17/09/2007, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> - suggestions for improvement heartily welcomed.
>
>
> - d.

Heartily welcomed?  Erm... not usually....

Anyhow, the suggestion is:
hide everything unencyclopaedic from
Google -- basically everything but main
space and image space.

Advantages:
* Don't need to worry about BLP violations
   outside of the encyclopaedia showing up
   on top of Google
* Hopefully less negative attention from
   outside - make Wikipaedians safer
* Encourage Wikipaedians to feel safe
   revealing whatever personal info counts
   as 'accountability' without that info showing
   up on Google
* The average reader won't be concerned
   with what goes on behind the scenes in
   wiki-building, no need to clog search
   engines shared with the rest of the world
   with all that
* No loss in transparency - all info is still
   publicly available (not necessarily a good
   thing, but not a change either)
* Discourage people not interested in
   encyclopaedia writing from using user
   pages as Myspace
* Probably more things I can't think of at the
   moment....